This autobiographical musical by Jonathan Larson, creator of the megahit Rent, is a revised version of a one-man show he used to perform around New York. Set in 1990, it chronicles a struggling songwriter’s anxiety about turning 30 without having achieved his dream of writing “the Hair of the 90s.” It’s a dream that Larson fulfilled at the age of 36 but didn’t live to enjoy: on the eve of Rent’s much anticipated opening, he died of an aortic aneurysm....
On their last two albums–Can Our Love…(Beggars Banquet, 2001) and Simple Pleasure (Island, 1999; it was never released in the U.S.)–England’s most elegant merchants of mope livened up their baroque sound with an undercurrent of R & B. Though front man Stuart Staples hardly sounded like he was down on his knees testifying, the rhythms were tauter, the horns punchier, and the execution sharper. But on the new Waiting for the Moon Tindersticks seem to have abandoned Al Green and Curtis Mayfield and returned to more likely sources of inspiration: Leonard Cohen, Nick Cave, Scott Walker....
TLC Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Few records in recent memory embody the contradictions of contemporary R & B better than TLC’s Fanmail (LaFace), a ping-pong match between keep-it-real-ism and materialism. At the start, T-Boz, Left Eye, and Chilli get down with the fans who’ve sent in letters over the years, cooing, “Just like you, I get lonely too,” but return to their pedestal soon thereafter–and for the rest of the album, it’s the men who grovel....
21 AD Asia Jump Rhythm Jazz Project Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Only one of these concerts made tradition its explicit topic, but all three wrestled with it. “21 AD Asia,” curated by Pranita Jain, explored the similarities of Asian dance traditions and blended them with non-Asian forms. Modern dancer-choreographer Nana Shineflug described her contribution to the evening, a solo, as honoring and expressing the idea that “we’re all everything,” and Jain included a piece using classical bharata natyam moves to interpret Navajo and Sanskrit religious chants....
Alasdair Roberts declared his love for British folk music in 2001 with The Crook of My Arm (Secretly Canadian), an acoustic solo album of songs he learned from the likes of Shirley Collins, Dick Gaughan, and Anne Briggs. At the time it seemed like a tangential ramble off the path his folk-rock band Appendix Out was on, but in hindsight it appears to have been a simple step forward. On the recent Farewell Sorrow (Drag City), he retires the band name in favor of his own and borrows more explicitly than ever from traditional material, hijacking ye olde tropes for his own purposes and even incorporating lyrical and melodic fragments of old folk tunes into his originals....
This program of three wordless works in the Playing French festival is largely devoid of physical expressivity despite a claim by performer T. Daniel in one of several stupefying program notes. “The movement imagery of this collaboration has never been seen before in the field of modern mime,” he insists while describing Shadows of a Mind, a piece in which he fidgets about half-heartedly so that his shadow fills Etienne Bertrand Weill’s abstract shapes, projected on a screen....
Another One Bites the Dust But “progressivism” can mean whatever a newspaper wants it to, and a U-turn isn’t the same as a slow but steady change of course. About a year ago, coworkers say, Sherffius’s bosses started getting after him to tone down his more liberal cartoons. “Everybody improves by editing,” says Soeteber. “I would put [cartoonists] in the same category as columnists–nobody is 100 percent sacrosanct. I don’t believe in messing [with cartoons] except in the most extreme circumstances, but I think we all get better by giving and taking....
Fort Dearborn, built in 1803, had three cannons, scores of muskets, and as many as 96 American soldiers, who lived behind 14-foot walls of rough-hewn logs. These inner walls, which were topped with iron “crow’s-feet,” were surrounded by a lower second fence made of saplings, and the no-man’s-land between the walls could be swept by gunfire from two blockhouses at opposite corners of the fort. The blockhouses could also fire beyond the outer walls should an Indian or British enemy rashly approach....
The best moments of the Free Associates’ improvised parody of NBC’s ER don’t dwell on specifics but capture the overall feel of the show–the nail-biting tension in the emergency room, the life-and-death urgency of every injury, the smug self-importance of its impossibly resourceful physicians. But BS also works well when it caters to the TV show’s die-hard audience: a performer’s coy reference during a recent performance to a gruesome aspect of ER’s season premiere resulted in a rash of comic dismemberments....
Trumpeter David Young is on a pretty impressive streak. His debut album, last spring’s Appassionata (Big Chicago)–an excellently crafted if preciously conceived suite, with four “acts” that address the varied colors of love–earned a warm reception from jazz radio and the midwestern music press. He got the nod to play the Chicago Jazz Festival in September, and later that fall at the Chicago Humanities Festival he premiered a commissioned piece celebrating the musical legacy of Bronzeville; earlier this month, the Tribune’s Howard Reich gave the Young bandwagon its biggest push by naming the 23-year-old one of 16 “Chicagoans of the Year” in the arts....
Hands down, this is the funniest film I’ve seen all year. French character actor Artus de Penguern (best known in the States as Hipolito the writer in Amelie) makes his feature-directing debut with this 2001 rip-off of Martin Scorsese’s After Hours, and though it’s not quite as dark as its New York predecessor, its ironic sensibility, cruel slapstick, and perverse twists of fate are consistently hilarious. De Penguern plays the title character, a hapless office drone who falls in love with the beautiful ballet instructor (Pascale Arbillot) he spies in a dance studio across the street....
“I don’t know why, but people like to see puppets swear and have sex,” says Andrew McNeal. “There’s a lot of vulgarity and curse words you shouldn’t say in public but can get away with if you have a sock puppet on your hand.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » McNeal should know. He and his partners in Harvey Finklestein’s Institute of Whimsical, Fantastical, and Marvelous Puppet Masterage first came to relative fame last year with their production of Sock Puppet Showgirls, a profane 30-minute send-up of Paul Verhoeven’s famously bad 1995 film....
Michael Maher, a Catholic lay minister, was touring museums in Florence two years ago when his week of Renaissance art–which included a visit to Michelangelo’s David–brought on an epiphany. “Why,” he wondered, “did they decide that all these biblical characters should be nude?” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Word Made Flesh, which opens this weekend at Bailiwick Arts Center, is the product of Maher’s reflections on how the sacred is expressed through the human form in art....
Wheaton may be the holiest city in Illinois. Like Jerusalem, it contains the shrines of many faiths. Wheaton College was the training ground of fundamentalist Billy Graham. Gary Memorial United Methodist Church is renowned for its stained glass windows. And on the northern fringe of town, set like a country manse among 42 arbored acres, is Olcott, the headquarters of the Theosophical Society in America. The theosophistswho begin their day with meditation, hold yoga classes at lunchtime, and may end with an evening lecture on Anglo-Saxon runesare grandparents of the New Age movement....
Deliver Us From Eva With Gabrielle Union, LL Cool J, Duane Martin, Essence Atkins, Robinne Lee, Meagan Good, Mel Jackson, and Dartanyan Edmonds. With Kate Hudson, Matthew McConaughey, Adam Goldberg, Shalom Harlow, Michael Michele, Bebe Neuwirth, Robert Klein, Kathryn Hahn, and Thomas Lennon. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The two movies also share the same sense of humor, trying with limited success to mine laughs from the supposed differences between men and women–as opposed to the differences between a particular man and a particular woman, which are what animate The Awful Truth....
By Mike Sula A few weeks later a videotape arrived in the mail. “I was just told that this guy was interested in getting my opinion of this film his dad made,” says Spitz. He popped the tape in his VCR and found himself watching a soundless 28-minute color film. Titled Navaho Boy and set in a gorgeous desert landscape, it appeared at first to be an ethnographic documentary about a family of Native Americans–not actors–going about their daily business: weaving, brushing their hair, preparing food....
Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » High school senior Trevor Loflin scored a perfect 1600 on his SATs this year, despite the fact that he’d spent the past three years living with his mother and sisters in the back of their Chevrolet Suburban. After his mother, Cynthia Hamilton, lost her job as a physician in Fresno, California, she decided to homeschool her kids and discovered that they got along just fine without a house (though they recently moved into a one-bedroom apartment)....
In 1983 Kestutis Nakas was on the verge of giving up acting, even though he’d been landing occasional roles in TV commercials and soaps. “I wasn’t working enough,” says Nakas, who was living in New York at the time. “But then I said, ‘I’m going to do one more thing before I quit.’” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Nakas went on to become a fixture on the East Village performance scene, writing and directing a series of vaudevillian plays about, among other things, Andrew Carnegie and the supposed occult power of the sword that pierced the side of Jesus on the cross....
When the “Rothenberg Report,” a nonpartisan political newsletter, ran a story about the race for Illinois’ Fifth Congressional District, it summed up the contest with the headline “Big Names Versus Polish Name.” The Democratic A-list had lined up behind Rahm Emanuel, the former Daley finance director and Clinton adviser. Meanwhile, Polish civic leaders, journalists, and well-wishers were gathering along the campaign trail to schmooze with Emanuel’s opponent, Nancy Kaszak. In this company Kay-zak became Ka-schak, which is how they’d say it in Gdansk....
So get this: they’re going to make a movie of my life. Which she is, and she sticks by her thing not to even use her own phone, but right away I realize that it’s not an awful lot of fun being watched, which I suppose is what my readers are doing in a certain way, except they’re not in my house. The first day or two she just takes a lot of notes....
